"This exhibition is a kind of game like Alice in Wonderland, when Alice goes through the mirror and enters another reality, a completely different dimension. That is what we are going to see, that other dimension of the paintings , that which is hidden in them but which is absolutely important and which is as much a part of the work as its painted surface", underlines Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado Museum when presenting Reversos, a large exhibition that proposes a new way of looking at the canvases, in their corporeality, in their three dimensions, creating a surprising cabinet of curiosities, of wonders. A cabinet in which, on many occasions, the masterpieces are against the wall - others in display cases that the visitor can go around to see both sides - such as the faithful reproduction of the back of Las Meninas that opens the large exhibition.
An exhibition in which there are surprising paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Goya, Magritte, Miró, Tàpies, Hammershoi and Pistoletto that show the fascination of the great geniuses for the back of the canvases, for their backs, stretchers, and easels. An exhibition in which the paintings sometimes hide ribald eroticism, as in the case of Martin van Meytens' canvas Kneeling Nun (1731) whose reverse - which can be seen thanks to an indiscreet mirror - shows the same praying novice... with bare buttocks, a painting that the Swedish ambassador in Paris had in his bathroom and showed only a few friends. A journey in which many backs of the canvases keep sarcastic messages and stamps from the numerous trips made. But an exhibition that, Falomir highlights, could only open by alluding to Las Meninas, the Prado's most iconic work.
"There are many things," he emphasizes, "that draw attention to Las Meninas, but without a doubt one of the things that does so most is that large portion of its surface, approximately one fifth, that occupies the back of the canvas on which it is Velázquez working. In some way that is the starting point of this exhibition that aims for many things. Above all, something that I believe that Velázquez already wanted, and that is to remind us that art and particularly in this case painting is not just an image The works of art are three-dimensional. When you see the painting and its back, when you see the painting, its frame and the back, it is as if you were in front of an archaeological site and saw all its stratigraphy. And how the different layers , each one of them contributes new knowledge".
And he says that the curator of the exhibition, the artist Miguel Ángel Blanco, has been able to give "conceptual density to a topic that goes far beyond the anecdote of turning a painting upside down." "The amount of suggestions and reflections he makes is impressive, with findings such as seeing the frames of the paintings as crosses. Then, he has carried out a great deal of research on the museum's collection. Many of the works are ours and many are not. They had never been shown before. And it also makes us see that it is a theme that is not limited to a given moment, the exhibition moves with absolute freedom from the 15th to the 21st century," says Falomir.
And he remembers that the Baroque began to give the subject its own entity: "It is wonderful to see how, although they never met, two great geniuses of universal history, Velázquez and Rembrandt, think practically the same thing. In the first painting of the exhibition, by Rembrandt is seen thinking in front of a painting whose backside is visible, practically the same thing that Velázquez does in Las Meninas. And the theme of the backside ends up becoming an artistic subgenre in itself."
The assembly, which allows the viewer to take an active role by moving around many paintings, has required, Blanco points out, three weeks of work: "I always considered it as a very open exhibition, a free tour, discovering each section. And I "I suggested that the rooms should be painted black. And I think that the works have never been seen better, it makes the viewer aware of their spatial interaction with the works and the relationships established between them, often unexpected, become clearer."
The curator remembers that the tour begins with the Middle Ages, when paintings really have the status of objects because they are transported for individual devotion or for the exchange of portraits, and he says that he has searched in the Prado warehouses for "inscriptions, drawings, sketches , brands, labels, folds and even elusive ghosts", but they have also obtained loans from 29 museums and international collections.
If you initially see the backs of the paintings painted by the masters themselves, often in self-portraits such as those of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, you immediately see that these backs are of particular interest to them and they play with them in the baroque tradition of trompe l'oeil, in a section which in this case opens a fascinating painting by René Magritte, in which on the back of a painting with an irregular frame the words "sky", "human body (or forest)", "curtain" and "facade of wood" are mysteriously inscribed. home". A section in which he plays with Louis-Leopold Boilly's symbolic trompe l'oeil with a cat crossing the back of the canvas of a painting to eat the herrings hanging behind it.
The stretchers seen as crosses - a section in which they show for the first time the original Guernica stretcher with which he traveled to so many countries and which is a work in itself - give way to the two-sided works, with creations on both sides and then to others that were not but had very advanced sketches behind them, sometimes from the work itself and other times real surprises: the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted 135 fascinating rears. Due to his poverty he reused them. Annibale Carracci hides behind his painting a palimpsest of dead people and remains, and Benlliure reuses a fiercely crossed out sketch of a female body to self-portrait.
Many times behind there are labels and stamps, from samples and travels, texts that indicate belonging, but also other very ironic ones, such as that of La lavava by Eugenio Lucas Velázquez, a painting in which Goyesque characters hold a man to administer an enormous enema: "What were you thinking? You fool! Well, in this world no one escapes." And there is a painting by Salomon Koninck, A Philosopher, pasted behind it with an obituary published in the press of the heartthrob Lord Grandville, British ambassador to France and Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, and another label places it in the possession of the Jewish dealer Adolphe Schloss, whose collection was confiscated by the Nazis. There is no shortage of true ghosts in the exhibition, those that appear "when the oils infiltrate the less dense tissues and draw figures with an essential profile," says Blanco, and the most impressive, he points out, is a self-portrait by Orazio Borgianni whose ghost looms behind .
The president of the Prado board, Luis Solana, emphasizes that "today with this exhibition we really turn the museum around in the most etymological sense of the term."
